5. How to find inside revitalization ideas from Inside Sources

From Restaurant Dining by Design (Chapter 3, Slim by Design)

​When you’re handed a menu, how do you decide what to order? You probably skim over what’s listed and screen out things you don’t like (the eggplant and puffer fish stir-fry). Then you narrow it down to two or three finalists. You may think you made these choices yourself, but you really didn’t. Your finalists were largely biased by the menu’s layout.

There’s an art and a science to understanding how we read menus. The world’s greatest expert at doing this is my friend Gregg Rapp, an urbane but unassuming man who lives high above Palm Springs in an Architectural Digest-worthy mid-century home that is Frank Sinatra hip. Gregg’s a professional menu engineer. He shows restaurants how to redesign their menus so they guide our eyes to the most profitable items they can sell. But the same principles can be used to help guide our eyes to the healthier foods (which, again, are often the most profitable). Most important, we can use his principles to find hidden healthy treasures and not just settle for the red-boxed, big-type-size listing for the Half-a-Bison Burger we couldn’t ignore.

When it comes to what you order for dinner, two things matter most: What you see on the menu and how you imagine it will taste.

1. What you see. We read menus in a Z-shaped pattern. We start in the top left, move to the top right, go to the middle, veer down to the bottom left, and end up on the bottom right. After that, we look at whatever catches our eye--boxes, bold type, pictures, logos, or icons. Basically, any item that looks different is going to get your attention and make you just a little bit more likely to order it. As Gregg says, if the shrimp salad for $8.99 is in a regal-looking burgundy font in a lightly shaded gold box and has a little chef’s hat icon next to it, even Mr. Magoo wouldn’t miss seeing it. He might not buy it, but he’ll consider it. He might remind himself that he had shrimp for lunch or is hungrier for beef, but he might also think, Shrimp salad . . . that sounds good for a change.Still, it’s a big step from reading the menu to ordering the shrimp salad. What stands in between? Just your imagination. If the words used in the menu lead you to expect this salad will be fresh, flavorful, and filling, you’re a lot closer to ordering it than if they made it sound like fishing bait.

2. How you imagine it will taste.With well-engineered menus, what you seeisn’t a coincidence and what you imagineisn’t a coincidence. Your imagination is guided. A great menu guides your imagination to build these expectations so you’re tasting as you’re reading. Again, it leads you to think the shrimp will be “fresh and flavorful” instead of “live bait.” It can be done in two words. A few years ago, a staid, sleepy place named Bevier Cafeteria wanted to rebrand itself by offering a bunch of healthy new foods. The problem with healthy foods is that most people don’t want them. They want tasty foods--if they happen to be healthy, that’s great but secondary. My buddy Jim Painter and I reviewed the menu and did nothing more than tweak the names of some of the items, adding a descriptive word here or there: red beans and rice became traditional Cajunred beans and rice, seafood fillet became succulent Italianseafood fillet, and so on. Not a single thing changed in the recipes themselves--the only difference was two descriptive words.

Not only did foods with the descriptive names sell 27 percent more, they were rated as tastier than those with the plain boring old names.[i],Not only that, but when people ate a food with an “improved” name, they even liked the cafeteria better--rating it as more trendy and up-to-date.[ii]They even rated the chef as having more years of European culinary training. In reality, for all we knew the guy had beenfired from Arby’s two months earlier.

And it didn’t even matter how ridiculousthe names were. We egregiously renamed chocolate cake as Belgian Black Forest Double-Chocolate Cake. This was nasty, dried-out chocolate sheet cake--really sad stuff. Now it doesn’t even matter that the Black Forest isn’t even in Belgium--when we askeddiners what they thought of the cake, some raved about it. One guy went on and on, concluding with,“It reminds me of Antwerp.” Where in Antwerp, I wondered, an abandoned food cart at the train station? Adding a couple words changed sales, tastes, and attitudes toward the restaurant. And it even reminded one person of a delusional vacation.So what kinds of words do restaurants rely on to help make a satisfied sale? We analyzed 373 desciptive menu items from around the country and found four categories of vivid names:[iii]

1. Sensory names:Describing the texture, taste, smell, and mouth feel of the menu item raises our taste expectations. Pastry chefs are the masters of these, using evocative names like Velvety Chocolate Mousse, but a great main menu also has Crisp Snow Peas, Pillowy Handmade Gnocchi, Fork-tender Beef Stew 2. Nostalgic names:Alluding to the past can trigger happy wholesome associations of tradition, family, and national origin. Think Old-style Manicotti, Oktoberfest Red Cabbage, and Grandma’s Chicken Dumplings, or words like Classic or House Favorite.3. Geographic names:Words that create an image or ideology of a geographic area associated with the food. Think Iowa Farm-raised Pork Chops, Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad, Carolina Mustard Barbecue, or Georgia Peach Tart.4. Brand names:Cross-promotions are catching on fast in the chain restaurant world. They tell us, “If you love the brand, you’ll love this menu item.” That’s why we can buy Jack DanielsâBBQ Ribs, and TwixâBlizzards. For the high-end restaurants, this translates into Niman Ranch pork loin or a Kobe beef kebab.

A smart restaurant owner who wants you to eat his healthy, high-margin foods can engineer his menu so that you see them first, and he can describe them so you taste them in your mind. Unfortunately, he could also engineer his menu for evil purposes to guide toward his most profitable unhealthyfoods. You can avoid this by decoding some of these seductive names and uncovering the hidden healthy treasures instead.

Most non-chain restaurants don’t list their calories, but it’s still pretty easy to break their code and figure out whether their special of the day will make you fit or fat. For the past few months we’ve been tracking the calories on the menus of chain restaurants. Our research is far from complete, but here are some preliminary rules of thumb. On average, if a restaurant put the word “buttery” in the name of a dish, it will have 102 more calories in it. Anything described with the word “crispy” had 131 more calories than its non-“crispy” counterpart.

But just as there are high-calorie words, there are low-calorie words. Order something that is described as seasoned, roasted, or marinated and you won’t be regretting it on the treadmill. These foods had about 60 calories fewer than their non-seasoned, roasted, or marinated counterpart.